Details on US President Barack Obama's upcoming Asian tour released in a White House press briefing Oct. 7 indicate that the president's anticipated China visit will include stops Nov. 15-18 in both Beijing and Shanghai. While in China, according to the briefing, Obama will hold his third bilateral meeting with Chinese President Hu Jintao (pictured here with Obama) to discuss ways of addressing challenges and expanding cooperation on key regional and global issues including security, nuclear nonproliferation, energy, and climate change. While no further details on the president's China visit were released, his Shanghai stop could include an inspection of the $61 million US pavilion currently under construction for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai.

President Obama's Asian tour coincides with his participation in the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit Nov. 13-15 in Singapore. Following his departure from Washington Nov. 11 according to the briefing, the president will visit Japan Nov. 12 and 13, meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama before traveling on to Singapore for the APEC summit. Following the summit, Obama will travel on to China; then to Seoul, South Korea, where his visit Nov. 18-19 will include meetings both with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak and with US service members before returning home to Washington. There is no word in the briefing as to whether the president plans any public events during his tour or if he will be accompanied by his family.

Obama's meeting with Hu Jintao during his China visit will be his third since taking office, the two having previously met in London in April and in New York in September. China Daily reports today that the Chinese president will likely urge his US counterpart to abandon what China considers acts of trade protectionism such as Obama's recent approval of a 35% import tariff on tires from China. The US president, meanwhile, is likely to press his Chinese counterpart on reaching a bilateral climate change agreement. The North Korean nuclear issue is also likely to be an important topic of discussion with Hu as well as with leaders in Japan and South Korea. 

(See also: Reuters, BBC)

President of the United States Barack Obama has nominated Shanghai-based attorney David Huebner to serve as the next US ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. Mr. Huebner is a partner in the Shanghai office of US law firm Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP, where he specializes in international arbitration and mediation as head of the firm's China Practice and International Disputes Practice. A graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School, he has taught at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law and lectured both at Qinghua University and at East China University of Politics and Law on international dispute resolution and intellectual property issues. An accomplished legal scholar, Mr. Huebner has published and spoken widely in the US, Asia, and Europe on international dispute resolution topics, and has been named on numerous best practitioners lists, including IP Almanac (Best Lawyers), Super Lawyers, and Best Lawyers in America. He has also chaired the California Law Revision Commission, served as president of the Los Angeles Quality and Productivity Commission, and served in Tokyo as special assistant to the Honorable Koji Kakizawa, member of the lower house of the Japanese Diet and former Foreign Minister of Japan. President Obama's first openly gay ambassadorial nominee, Mr. Huebner is also the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's general counsel and has previously served on the group's board. If confirmed by the US Senate, Mr. Huebner will bring a wealth of global experience and legal scholarship to his new post as US ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa.

As an American living and working abroad I watched President Obama's speech at the United Nations General Assembly with great pride and more than a little relief:

Pride, following the shame of our previous administration's arrogant unilateralism; and relief, that our previous administration wasn't followed by another just like it or worse. All too well as an American abroad I recall the embarrassment of being represented on the world stage by a tactless, insensitive president who seemed to possess little more than a child's understanding of the world.

President Obama's speech at the UN General Assembly, on the other hand, was that of a true statesman and a world leader of the highest caliber, with no apologies and no excuses. I think it was among the best speeches of his career thus far.

Any criticism of it by his political opponents in the United States amounts to nothing but sour grapes and a sad attempt to deny their own disastrous failure of the past eight years.

(Letters, New York Times, Sept. 25, 2009)

SHANGHAI, CHINA-While strolling through the shopping arcades surrounding Shanghai's sixteenth-century Yu Garden this afternoon, I happened upon a t-shirt shop prominently displaying one shirt (pictured below) featuring the smiling image of US president Barack Obama beside other shirts including images of Che Guevara and Chairman Mao. Were such a juxtaposition of Obama, Guevara, and Mao to appear at a t-shirt shop in the United States, it would only serve to confirm for Obama's detractors that he is indeed some sort of Communist. Were it to appear at a t-shirt shop, say, in some left-wing mecca like my own San Francisco or Berkeley, I suppose it would surprise no one. Its appearance at a t-shirt shop in Mao's own People's Republic of China, however, struck me as something a little special.

When the president visits China in mid-November as planned, he may face an audience as tough as any he has faced at home. Obama's recent decision on behalf of the United Auto Workers union to impose a 35% tariff on tire imports from China has angered many Chinese and prompted calls for in-kind retaliatory measures against the United States. Unlike the president's fans in Europe, Africa, and even the Middle East, many pragmatic Chinese view US affairs strictly through the prism of how America's actions affect China's material interests, and will not be swayed by the kind of grand statements on world peace and brotherhood among men that so electrified his audiences in Berlin and Cairo. Nonetheless, admiration for Obama remains strong among the more idealistic youth of China, and here in front of me today was my president's image on a Chinese t-shirt.

I have been visiting China since 1991, and have spent altogether about a year and a half living in Shanghai; and this is the first time in China I have ever seen a US president's image on a t-shirt. I have also seen pirate DVD editions of Obama's speeches for sale on the street, and at my university have seen Chinese professors showing Obama's speeches to classrooms full of attentive students. My own students also seem to hold Obama, not merely in admiration, but even in a kind of awe. More than any other recent US president, Obama seems to be seen - at least among many young people in China - not merely as the president of one powerful overseas nation, but as a world leader perhaps of unprecedented importance, and from whom much is expected.

Of course, even older and less idealistic Chinese will tell you that Obama is "better than Bush." To his good fortune, Obama's immediate predecessor was one against whom it would be rather easy to win a popularity contest anywhere in the world except perhaps in Israel. Being "better than Bush" still serves Obama well, and probably will for some time to come. Despite the tendency here (at least for the average Zhou Six-Pack or Zhou the Plumber) to view US actions more-or-less exclusively on the basis of how they affect China, both Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq and his arrogant behavior with the world at-large made him immensely unpopular here. Just as Obama is the first US president whose image I've ever seen on a Chinese t-shirt, Bush was the first I've ever heard people in China tell me they just couldn't stand the sight of.

Despite his current troubles at home and abroad, however, Obama has far more going for him than the mere fact that he isn't George W. Bush. Appealing to the youth of China may be the key to his success here, and come November, I would hope to see many of China's youth wearing t-shirts like the one I saw today.

Perhaps I'll even see Zhou the Plumber wearing one.

Today was my first day of teaching at the big, new campus of Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) in suburban Songjiang: A cloudy day threatening rain that never came. Depending on traffic conditions, the bus ride to Songjiang from the older and smaller Hongkou campus in the city center where I live can take from 40 minutes to an hour or so, the Songjiang campus itself a spacious collection of buildings in international styles depending somewhat on what lies within.

The town of Songjiang is much older than Shanghai of which it is now a mere outskirt, and features an eleventh-century pagoda, a fourteenth-century mosque, and a hilltop Roman Catholic church built by Jesuit missionaries in the style of an Italian basilica in the 1920s on the site of an earlier church. Songjiang's historic cosmopolitanism, if not its age, is reflected in the diverse architectural styles of the SISU campus, which was completed in 2003 as one part of an even larger "university city" of satellite campuses for Shanghai institutions of higher learning.

Pictured here on the left is the library and on the right is one end of my building, the College of English Language and Literature (these, like previous shots below, are courtesy of my Nokia cellphone camera; better shots to come once I've purchased a proper digi-cam; click on pictures for larger image in new window): 

Here is the Italian-style law school as seen across a grassy plaza from the window of my classroom in the English college above (I'm not sure why Italian style was chosen for the law school - I might have gone for English neoclassical, or even Babylonian in honor of Hammurabi - but there you have it):

A little more evident in this building's Islamic style is Arabic and Middle East studies in addition to other Asian studies:

And finally here with onion dome is Russian studies (interesting factoid: back during the era of Mao and Stalin SISU was founded as Shanghai Russian College):

These are only a few of the buildings located at SISU's Songjiang campus (which I'm told is ten times the size of the Hongkou campus), but they are among the most distinctive. There are also Tudor-style "mini-villas" for faculty who live or stay at the campus: much larger and more luxurious than housing at the Hongkou campus where I live, and a tempting proposition were it not so far from the far livelier city center. Lovely and spacious though it is, the Songjiang campus does strike one as a little sterile compared to bustling Hongkou, where I think I'll stay put at least for the time being (see also previous posting below).